An Indispensable Genius Once Every Century

When I was 21 years old I read a truly impressive novel titled A Canticle for Leibowitz, by one Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Except for this novel Miller wrote some completely forgettable short stories. If it hadn’t been for this novel (which he worked on for five years) he too would have been completely forgotten.

This late ’50s novel is about the world being returned to the Stone Age, courtesy of (as always happened in novels and movies in those days) a nuclear war.

Of course it took the world some 3000 years to get back to normal, including interstellar flight. Then, again, the world repeats with another nuclear war – only this time there is an escape to the stars.

In the second part of the book one of the characters made the comment that every century or so there appears an indispensable genius who completely changes the world.

In our time, in the early 20th Century, it was Albert Einstein (when I understood what E=MC2 meant I thought, “How did the universe end up like that”).

In the early 21th Century that indispensable genius is Stephen Hawking.

In the past there has been Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Aristotle. Each one changed the world.

There have been many others, far less known, who have expanded on these men’s discoveries.

I have no idea what produces these men.

I used to know a woman who told me her brother got a M.S. in Electrical Engineering. Their father was a baker and their mother a home-based seamstress and they lived in what wasn’t much more than a shack. One of her brother’s teachers, she told me, told him, “You are the student I’ve been waiting for my entire life.” (Hawking was working on his PhD in Physics when he was 20.)

And where were they from? Mount Vernon, Illinois, a nasty little town which I once visited.

How did this man come out of parents such as his, and a town like that? Again, I have no idea.

But I do know that when you are a once-a-century-genius you are born one. The proper education is also indispensable (the word “education” really means to draw out what is inside you) since no one can start at the beginning and do it all by themselves.

Even the ones who expand on what these men did are born that way.

Now what about the average man? What he does is maintain. That’s actually me. I don’t invent, I don’t discover – I maintain what exists. It’s men like me – and as I written before, there are millions of us (actually tens of millions) – who maintain civilization. That’s not something Hawking or Einstein or Aristotle or Adam Smith could ever do. They are the men who advance culture and civilization – but they can’t maintain it.

That’s why I never have had any problem with garbage men or plumbers or whatnot. They are indispensible to maintaining civilization (I’ve written before that I consider garbage men more important than doctors, since it’s possible to live your life without seeing a doctor, but what the hell are you supposed to do with your garbage?).

I’ve also written before of Carl Jung’s comments that men are indispensable because they are the culture-makers (and maintainers) and women are indispensable because they are the baby-makers.

Now what we have today is women wanting to give up being baby-makers because they delude themselves they can be culture-makers or maintainers. Sometimes they want to be both culture-makers and baby-makers (Have It All TM )at the same time.

It’s not going to happen. While there may be occasional women (one out of what? a hundred million?) who can be a culture-maker, there never has been, and never will be, a female Aristotle or Adam Smith or Einstein or Stephen Hawking.

Women overwhelmingly cannot create or even maintain culture/civilization. That is why, as I’ve mentioned before, P.J. O’Rourke has written that if civilization was in the hands of women it would last until the next oil change. Or, as Camille Paglia noticed, if civilization had been left in the hands of women we’d still be living in grass huts.

Contrary to leftist delusions people are not blank slates, which means they can be anything they want. If it was true we’d have a hell of a lot more Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings. Especially female ones. But we don’t have even one, do we?